European Union

On 9 March, SEDE will discuss, for the first time, its draft own-initiative report on private security companies (Rapporteur: Hilde Vautmans, ALDE). The report focusses on the increasingly important role played by private security companies in support of national militaries and EU activities abroad. It notes various challenges associated with their use and raises questions about regulating the activities of these quasi-transnational actors.
Further information
Draft report
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Place:    Europa building, Brussels
Chair:    Federica Mogherini, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy 

All times are approximate and subject to change

+/- 07.30    
Arrivals (live streaming) VIP entrance, Europa building 

+/- 07.45 (ttbc)
Doorstep by High Representative Federica Mogherini
VIP entrance, Europa building 

+/- 08.00     
Informal breakfast meeting of defence ministers 

+/- 10.00    
Joint meeting of Foreign Affairs/Defence Ministers (Roundtable)
Adoption of the agenda
Approval of non-legislative A items

Security and Defence - implementation of the EU Global Strategy 

+/- 12.30    
Working lunch with Foreign Minister of Egypt Sameh Hassan Shoukry 

+/- 14.30     Beginning of meeting (Roundtable)

Western Balkans
Migration
Middle East peace process
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Any other business      

 +/- 18.30     Press conference by Federica Mogherini (live streaming)
Main press room, Justus Lipsius building 

On 03 March 2017, the Council extended until 6 March 2018  the asset freezes against 15 people identified as responsible for the misappropriation of Ukrainian state funds or for the abuse of office causing a loss to Ukrainian public funds, following the annual review of the restrictive measures. One person was removed from the list.

The measures had initially been introduced in March 2014 and were extended in March 2015 and in March 2016.

The legal acts will be published in the Official Journal on 4 March 2017.

On behalf of the European Union, we would like to warmly congratulate you on your re-appointment as director-general of the World Trade Organization.

Trade is one of the most powerful drivers of growth, supporting millions of jobs and contributing to prosperity worldwide. The EU is strongly committed to an open and rules-based multilateral trading system, which is embodied in the WTO. As such, the EU remains a staunch supporter  of effective multilateralism in international affairs and will do its utmost to support you in your second mandate.

We wish you every success and look forward to working closely with you. 

To receive the Brussels Briefing in your inbox every morning, register for a free FT account here and then sign up here.

Jean-Claude Juncker’s white paper on the future of Europe asks what can be done to secure the foundations of a 27-country EU after Britain leaves. In the face of this titanic challenge, the European Commission presents stark political choices to government leaders as they seek a new remedy for the bloc’s many woes.

Read more

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Plenary sessions : New medicine prices in the EU have risen over the past few decades, to the point of being unaffordable for many EU citizens and threatening the sustainability of national health care systems, say MEPs in a resolution voted on Thursday. To strike a better balance between EU countries’ public health interests and those of the pharmaceutical industry, it calls for measures to improve the traceability of R&D costs, public funding and marketing expenditure.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Plenary sessions : New medicine prices in the EU have risen over the past few decades, to the point of being unaffordable for many EU citizens and threatening the sustainability of national health care systems, say MEPs in a resolution voted on Thursday. To strike a better balance between EU countries’ public health interests and those of the pharmaceutical industry, it calls for measures to improve the traceability of R&D costs, public funding and marketing expenditure.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Plenary sessions : The rules requiring EU member states to inform the EU Commission of their plans to negotiate energy supply deals with third countries before opening negotiations were approved by MEPs on Thursday. This is the first item of Energy Union legislation to be completed.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Plenary sessions : The rules requiring EU member states to inform the EU Commission of their plans to negotiate energy supply deals with third countries before opening negotiations were approved by MEPs on Thursday. This is the first item of Energy Union legislation to be completed.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Plenary sessions : Recommendations on how to make better use the EU’s trade tools to fight an unprecedented surge in wildlife trafficking were approved by MEPs on Thursday.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Plenary sessions : Recommendations on how to make better use the EU’s trade tools to fight an unprecedented surge in wildlife trafficking were approved by MEPs on Thursday.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Plenary sessions : The EU Commission is legally obliged to take measures temporarily reintroducing visa requirements for US citizens, given that Washington still does not grant visa-free access to nationals of five EU countries. In a resolution approved on Thursday, MEPs urge the Commission to adopt the necessary legal measures “within two months”.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Plenary sessions : The EU Commission is legally obliged to take measures temporarily reintroducing visa requirements for US citizens, given that Washington still does not grant visa-free access to nationals of five EU countries. In a resolution approved on Thursday, MEPs urge the Commission to adopt the necessary legal measures “within two months”.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Meng-Hsuan Chou, Jens Jungblut, Pauline Ravinet, and Martina Vukasovic

In this thematic issue of Policy and Society (all contributions are openly accessible), we highlight the multi-level, multi-actor, and multi-issue (the ‘multi-s’) nature of public policy using the case of higher education policies.

We begin with an overview of how the global shift towards knowledge-based economies and societies has placed ‘knowledge’ at the core of contemporary public policy and policymaking. The governance of knowledge, however, is not a neatly contained policy coordination exercise: it requires collaboration across multiple policy sectors that may have previously experienced very little or less interaction. For example, we can think of a (non-exhaustive) list of relevant policy areas to include, such as higher education, research, trade, foreign policy, development, or migration. In our view, higher education policy coordination is thus permeated with respective sectoral concerns, with discussions taking place across distinct policy arenas, sometimes in silos, both inside and outside of formal government channels.

While the above characterization brings forth the multi-issue aspect competing for attention in higher education policy coordination, we suggest that it also points to the presence of multiple actors: state actors from different ministries or agencies, representatives from universities and businesses, other non-state actors (interest groups, stakeholder organizations), as well as users of such coordinative outputs (concerned parents, students, as well as employers). As regular readers of this blog would recognize: the multi-issue and multi-actor features of higher education policy coordination often result in duplication, competition, inconsistencies, clashing priorities, and even potential bureaucratic and political conflict (Braun, 2008; Peters, 2015)—all symptoms of horizontal policy coordination challenges (Gornitzka, 2010).

We can add to this observation the fact that actors involved in the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of higher education policy (Gornitzka & Maassen, 2000; Olsen, 1988) often operate, and ‘shop’ for better policy solutions, across several governance levels. While the rise of the regions—both supranational and subnational—in the higher education policy domain has garnered some academic attention (Chou & Ravinet, 2015; Jayasuriya & Robertson, 2010), this multi-level dimension of policy coordination needs to be brought into sharper relief. Indeed, international knowledge policy coordination stretches across many levels, including the macro-regional (e.g. European Union—EU, Association of Southeast Asian Nations—ASEAN), the meso-regional (Nordics, Baltics—bilateral or multilateral cooperation among states sharing specific geographical features), sub-regional (also bilateral or multilateral cross-border cooperation between distinct territories of different states), as well as the state/national (in federal systems), sub-national, and organizational levels (see e.g. Piattoni, 2010 concerning multi-level governance in the European context).

In the introduction to this thematic issue, we present an analytical framework that would assist in identifying and studying the multi-issue, multi-actor, and multi-level features of contemporary policymaking and policy coordination. Specifically, we strongly argue that studying policy coordination in today’s higher education sector requires unpacking the three distinct characteristics of this very coordination and addressing them separately from one another as an independent perspective and recognizing their interaction as likely to be responsible for the outcomes observed. In so doing, we call for analysing how the ‘multi-s’ features affect the stability, changes, and evolution of individual and collective higher education policy coordination under observation. In academic practice (i.e. theory-building, research design, and empirical fieldwork), it means that it is essential to pay attention in the following ways when examining individual ‘multi-s’ characteristic:

1. Multi-level characteristic – focus on the antecedents and consequences of distribution or concentration of authority across governance levels;
2. Multi-actor characteristic – acknowledge both the heterogeneity of the ‘state’ and its many composite institutions as well as the involvement of non-state actors (e.g. stakeholder organizations, businesses, consumers) in this policy domain; and
3. Multi-issue characteristic – identify how clashes as well as complementarities between policy sectors and spill-overs move into and away from the policy domain of interest.

In our view, the ‘multi-s’ framework offers a solid first conceptual step to encapsulate and unravel the complexity observed within contemporary higher education policymaking and coordination. The thematic issue contains eight contributions that bring our observations to life with a range of cases (from higher education appropriations to work-based higher education programmes, stakeholder organizations, standardization, and higher education regionalisms) and developments across multiple countries and geographical areas (from the U.S. to China, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Europe and Southeast Asia).

We invite everyone interested in the increased complexity of governing, producing, and using knowledge in today’s policymaking to consider our framework as a more comprehensive way to gain a greater understanding of both historical and contemporary developments.

 

References

Braun, D. (2008). Organising the political coordination of knowledge and innovation policies. Science and Public Policy, 35(4), 227-239. doi:10.3152/030234208×287056

Chou, M.-H., & Ravinet, P. (2015). Governing higher education beyond the state: The rise of ‘Higher education regionalism’. In H. De Boer, D. D. Dill, J. Huisman, & M. Souto-Otero (Eds.), Handbook of Higher Education Policy and Governance (pp. 361-378). London: Palgrave.

Gornitzka, Å. (2010). Bologna in context: A horizontal perspective on the dynamics of governance sites for a Europe of Knowledge. European Journal of Education, 45(4), 535-548.

Gornitzka, Å., & Maassen, P. (2000). Hybrid steering approaches with respect to European higher education. Higher Education Policy, 13(3), 267-285.

Jayasuriya, K., & Robertson, S. L. (2010). Regulatory regionalism and the governance of higher education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 8(1), 1-6. doi:10.1080/14767720903573993

Olsen, J. P. (1988). Administrative reform and theories of organization. In C. Campbell & B. G. Peters (Eds.), Organizing governance, governing organizations (pp. 233-254). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Peters, B. G. (2015). Pursuing horizontal managment: the politics of public sector coordination. Kansas: University Press of Kansas.

Piattoni, S. (2010). The theory of multi-level governance: conceptual, empirical, and normative challenges. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The post The Politics of Higher Education Policies. Unravelling the Multi-level, Multi-actor, and Multi-issue dynamics appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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In this section you will find video coverage of events illustrating the relations between the EU and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Download this video here.

Plenary sessions : How should the EU evolve in response to challenges such as Brexit and globalisation? Jena-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, presented five possible options to the Parliament on 1 March, ranging from business as usual to deeper integration across most areas. During the subsequent plenary debate most MEPs welcomed the opportunity to reflect on the direction Europe should take. Watch our video for highlights from the debate.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Plenary sessions : How should the EU evolve in response to challenges such as Brexit and globalisation? Jena-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, presented five possible options to the Parliament on 1 March, ranging from business as usual to deeper integration across most areas. During the subsequent plenary debate most MEPs welcomed the opportunity to reflect on the direction Europe should take. Watch our video for highlights from the debate.

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Zentrale zur Bekämpfung unlauteren Wettbewerbs Frankfurt am Main
Approximation of laws
The cost of a call to an after-sales telephone number must not exceed the cost of a standard call

Place:
Europa building, Brussels

Chairs:
Mr Evarist Bartolo, Minister for education and employment
Ms Helena Dalli, Minister for social dialogue, consumer affairs and civil liberties, and
Mr Michael Farrugia, Minister for the family and social solidarity of Malta

All times are approximate and subject to change

+/- 09.15
Doorstep by Minister Farrugia

+/- 10.00
Beginning of Council meeting (Roundtable)
Adoption of the agenda
Adoption of non-legislative A Items

+/- 10.30
Coordination of social security systems (public session)

+/- 12.30
Enhancing the skills of women and men in the EU labour market (public session)

Other business (public session)1
-  Current legislative proposal -  Posting of workers in the framework of the provision of services (public session)
-  Safer and healthier work for all - Modernisation of the EU occupational safety and health legislation and policy

+/- 13.00
Working lunch on "Safer and healthier work for all - modernisation of the EU occupational, safety and health legislation and policy"

+/- 13.30
Press conference (Minister Farrugia, Justus Lipsius building press room - live streaming)

+/- 15.00  
(Roundtable)
European Semester 2017 (public session)
a)    Implementation of the country-specific recommendations: Enhancing labour market access and reducing divergences across the EU
b)    Priorities for action in the areas of employment and social policies: Political guidance in 2017
c)    2017 Country reports

+/- 16.30
Tripartite Social Summit (public session)

Other business
-  Investing in Europe's youth (public session)1
-  2017 work Programmes of the Employment Committee (EMCO) and Social Protection Committee (SPC) (public session)1
-  UNECE International Conference "A sustainable society for all ages: Realising the potential of living longer" (Lisbon, 21-22 September 2017) (public session)1
-  Key findings of the study of the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) on "Economic benefits of gender equality in the EU"

+/- 17.00
Press conference (Ministers Dalli and Bartolo, Justus Lipsius building press room - live streaming)

 1   To be decided by qualified majority at the beginning of the meeting.